Can the DJI Fly app return the drone to a specific altitude/bearing/gps location/gimbal for “through the seasons” type work?
If not, I’m guessing I’ll have to wait for one of the third party apps to be made compatible with my MA2.
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Hi @KAM No it can’t yet and I don’t know if its a feature they may add at some point? I’m currently waiting for the highly recommended Litchi App to support the MA2 for exactly the same reason as you lol hoping it won’t be too long now as I believe that DJI have released a new SDK which supports MA2 
The alternative would be to try and do it manually but that will probably be difficult to get really good results
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All that said I’ve just read that waypoints is apparently supported in the Fly App in Hyperlapse mode so you could run 4 hyperlapse flights in different seasons and blend them in post edit which could give a pretty cool effect 
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Great minds and all that.
I was thinking that if you could run a panning hyper lapse over 6 minutes you could pick an image from each second for every day of the year.
You’d be capturing from video though would you?!
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Thats a great idea and I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure with Hyperlapse you are taking individual images and not video so the quality should be good
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Or even video. 1 second of video for each day and get them to blend so there’s as little jerkiness between the clips.
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That would look awesome but a hell of alot of edit points 
you would need the patience of a Saint 
lol well worth exploration though
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I’m sure the hyperlapse save the images. And if stationary you’d get the same view - if the Fly app can return you to the same position and (more importantly) the same heading.
I’ve done the same kind of thing - albeit not with drone footage - daily pics of the garden from early spring to full bloom. But, similarly, the camera was close to the same position on the tripod each day, and I tried to line it up as close as possible each day.
I then took all the images into Photohop and aligned them, then took them into Davinci Resolve at a default of 1 secs for each image, with a 1 sec pre-roll and post-roll, then applies a half second fade transitions between each clip and the next.
All of that created a “half second of fade - half second of still - half second of fade”, and no discernible image movement between clips.
More tricky is the change in lighting, contrast and colour casts between sunny days and cloudy days. That has to be done manually. Still a job in progress for me.
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Here’s a few secs … not sure which of my versions this was … just an example.
Since flowers grow, there’s a pan upwards introduced, too.
Since I was working from full res camera raw images, there’s plenty of spare resolution to crop/pan.
The project is all 4k - this was a quick 720/high compression render of the few frames.
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Thats really cool Dave this would work great through the seasons with great effect. Alot of hard work involved I’m sure
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Hoping you get the right weather will be the most difficult thing - out of one’s control.
I tried to take the pics at the same time of day … early morning so that bit of the garden was always in the shade from the sun, but the changes is colour from blue sky to cloudy sky are a real pain. With a drone you won’t even have the benefit of shade.
The processing in PS and DR was the easy bit.
Then grading each clip the most tricky.
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The tricky bit is committing the time of day for a year. I tried similar on my stills camera a few years ago in my hometown, Framlingham, Suffolk. I had a great view of Market Hill. Ultimately work stopped me getting the full 365. What I did have worked well but it wasn’t a full year, so defeated my object.
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Some security cameras take a pic every so many minutes/secs.
Setting one of those up they can often hold over a week of stills. Plenty enough to save the “ten o’clock in the morning pic” from each day.
Quality won’t be raw, and optics not amazing, but it can be a very cheap way of achieving a result, since the visual defects in the stills gets a little lost when converted to video … even if each day’s pic is held for half a sec.
Also - no alignment needed. 
Obviously, it needs to be somewhere you can leave the camera. The pavement, for my garden pics, wasn’t an option.
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This is something Dronelink can do really well. Build a mission and fly it as many times you want throughout the year. Bit of a learning curve but in my opinion a brilliant app, well worth the money.
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Litchi does the same - for the models it works with.
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My post wasn’t in response to yours, just a suggestion to others interested.
I’d seen your post and details.
As above, the garden was done with a decent camera in RAW.
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It would if you have the thread on notification.